High memory usage

Vlad

ajgraves Thanks for willingness to do this.

There are two things I would have you try:

Repeat the test without any extensions. (to rule out extensions/extension support)
Repeat the test with a similar WebKit browser (Safari) to rule out this just being the way WebKit handles memory

After these two tests (in as similar conditions as possible) we will have a better picture.

ajgraves

Vlad Thanks Vlad! I will disable Bitwarden in Orion for the next test. I will also use Safari for a bit and see what I can come up with in terms of how Safari behaves. In the mean time, let me know if there's any additional data points I can gather, etc.

ajgraves

Latest test, see my note in the shutdown section. Basically Orion froze and I had to force quit it, so this test should be considered moot as Orion wasn't given a chance to free memory before it was shut down gracefully.

All extensions disabled

Startup

Startup time: Sunday, August 07, 2022 at 12:22

Tabs currently open:

https://orionfeedback.org

Processes running: 5
1 x "Orion" (83.1 MB)
1 x "Orion Web Content" (252.8 MB)
1 x "Orion Web Content (Prewarmed)" (12.0 MB)
1 x "Orion Networking" (13.6 MB)
1 x "com.apple.audio.SandBoxHelper" (2.8 MB)

Total memory usage: 364.3 MB

Shutdown

Note: Orion completely froze up and I had to force kill it from the activity monitor. I took a screenshot of the current values in the activity monitor, however I don't have full details on the tabs I had open at the time. Unfortunately I'd suggest this test be moot, given that I wasn't able to carefully "walk down" the amount of tabs open, etc, which should give Orion a chance to free some memory it was holding on to. However, I included it in the interest of full disclosure.

Shutdown time: August 10, 2022 at 16:22

Tabs currently open: approx 20 across 2 windows

Processes running: 31
1 x "Orion" (553.8 MB)
22 x "Orion Web Content (Prewarmed)" (744.8, 737.1, 539.2, 456.6, 454.8, 365.6, 361.7, 336.9, 290.8, 287.2, 277.8, 263.6, 235.0, 206.6, 193.0, 190.1, 169.1, 143.3, 129.6, 118.3, 106.7, 12.4)
3 x "Orion Web Content" (712.5, 685.3, 143.1)
1 x "com.apple.WebKit.GPU.Orion" (181.2)
1 x "Orion Networking" (163.3)
1 x "VTDecoderXPCService" (61.9)
2 x "MTLCompilerService" (6.0, 5.4)

Total memory usage: 9,132.7 MB

Going to test Orion again for a couple of days without Bitwarden, then will test Safari to compare.

BLah

I have this same issue and I've been following this thread. Tried running orion without having bitwarden enabled, though I had RES, privacy badger and ublock origin enabled. Today I noticed my system slow down as it does whenever Orion starts using too much memory and noticed the main process at whopping 6,38GB + all the subprocesses. I had around 15 tabs open at that point, and closing them did not free any memory at all on the main process even after letting the browser sit for couple of minutes. I will also try using Orion without any extensions for a while now, but I doubt it's the extensions' fault. Orion 0.99.118.1-beta on M1 macbook air with big sur 12.4.

Vlad

BLah @ajgraves

As long as the reports are "point in time" reports they are of no use to us. We have no idea whether Safari would behave the same in the circumstances you describe.

A valid test would be using Orion and Safari in same conditions (same or similar pages open) with same extensions (if same extensions are not avaialble for safari then use without any extensions) and comparing usage.

By observing resource use and comparing them in same/similar conditions (same is not possible) we can derive some conclusions.

ajgraves

Vlad This is valid, I will have to change up my testing methodology. This will become trickier as my 16GB of RAM can get taxed just using Orion and a few other apps throughout the day. I'll need to dedicate some time to ONLY running Orion and Safari side by side as a comparison. Unfortunately it usually takes a couple of days to really see the problem.

emanuel

Step to reproduce: I opened Orion and Safari side by side and run speedometer 5 times, at the end Orion was using around 600mb of ram while Safari was using 200mb

Realised on a M1 MBA with 16gb of ram

Vlad

emanuel Not able to reproduce. Please provide a video (side-by-side) og both browsers open and activity monitor

BLah

I haven't had any memory leaks or system slow-downs with Orion after disabling Bitwarden extension (Chrome version) even after multiple continuous days of use. I'll try switching to the FF version and see if it occurs again.

ajgraves

BLah I use Bitwarden from the Firefox store and it doesn't make any difference, in my experience.

While I continue to see ballooning memory without being freed without any extensions, I'm still struggling to get results that are good enough for the team to use to really hunt this down. I haven't been able to set aside time to run a test mirroring between Orion and Safari (and I'm loath to disable all extensions in Safari as I don't want to imagine life without an ad blocker).

I will note that I saw similar behavior using Vivaldi for several days, memory usage on the main process grew to over 1GB and was not released when tabs were closed. Restarting the browser corrected it, obviously. With that said, the way Vivaldi works is different from other Chromium based browsers, since the UI for Vivaldi is technically browser chrome as well and relies heavily on javascript and such. I haven't seen similar behavior in my usage of Brave.

lupus_balticus

So bad I could barely do anything else, even force-quitting took 5 seconds.

Vlad

lupus_balticus I am not sure if you realize that posting screenshots like this does not get us any closer to solving or even reproducing the problem 🙂

lupus_balticus

Vlad , ha, yeah, and I'm not complaining, love the browser and I pay for the search 😃 Just posting to confirm that it's not an isolated problem. Keep up the good work!

Vlad

lupus_balticus Thanks. Screenshot alone does not make it a problem necessarly. Perhaps you loaded enough payload in the browser that would require it to allocate that much RAM etc.. Perhaps other browsers would do the same in similar circumstances. A single screenshot does not tell a significant story.

Cannabat

@Vlad

I have had this issue for a while. In fact I have made it a habit to restart Orion once a day to mitigate this.

I should have reported this ages ago but have been a bit busy - today I am running a very memory intensive process and saw Orion using 9GB of memory for ₂₀ tabs and thought I oughta dig in.

Here is a video (279MB) demonstrating the issue with Orion and Safari side-by-side, hosted on my iCloud Drive: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/02c-S4hqJgglAT7CW7CbRpVAg#Screen_Recording_2022-08-30_at_13.56

Before recording, I did the following:

Open the same tabs in Orion and Safari - actual tabs I am working on today.
Quit both applications

During recording, I did the following:

Open both Orion and Safari, restoring the last window in Safari, so both browsers have the same tabs
Switch through all open tabs to load them into memory
Use iStat menus to get cumulative memory usage by both applications including child processes, intermittently opening it to show the memory usage
Repeatedly close and reopen the same 9 (arbitrarily chosen number) tabs in each browser to simulate having the browser open for a long browsing session that includes opening and closing many tabs.

Observations:

Memory usage between Safari and Orion is comparable at the start and after opening and loading all the tabs, as expected - around 3.5 to 4GB.
After repeatedly open and closing the same 9 tabs, Safari uses the same amount of memory as it did before this procedure, as expected - around 3.5GB.
After repeatedly open and closing the same 9 tabs, Orion uses substantially more memory than it did before this procedure, not as expected! Over 6GB. It does not ever decrease from that number until the parent process is quit.
Not recorded is further experimentation where I determined the amount of excess memory used by Orion increases proportionally to the number of tabs opened. In other words, the more tabs I open and then close, the more memory it uses. I just closed all tabs and reopened them and Orion is using about 9GB of memory.

Side-issue:

I don't think I captured this in the video, but both Orion and Safari, after opening the same tabs and then closing them so that only 1 tab is open for Safari or 2 pinned tabs for Orion, both use an embarrassingly large amount of memory.

When both start without any tabs, they use something on the order of 200MB each. But after opening a lot of tabs and then closing almost all, both Orion and Safari use more like 1.5 to 2GB of memory! I would expect the memory usage to drop down to the low hundreds of MB. So, clearly an upstream issue, not to be pursued here.

Orion 0.99.119-beta (WebKit 615.1.1)
macOS Version 12.5.1 (Build 21G83)
MacBookPro18,3

Session Info:

Open windows => 2
Pinned tabs => 2
Active window tabs => 17
Active tab url => https://orionfeedback.org/d/2627-orion-not-freeing-memory/29

Enabled Extensions:

Disabled Extensions:

LibRedirect (firefox)
SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip Sponsorships (firefox)
Reddit Enhancement Suite (firefox)
uBlock Origin (firefox)
Mate Translate – translator, dictionary (chrome)
Dark Reader (firefox)
MTG Quick Search (chrome)
Bitwarden - Free Password Manager (firefox)

Non Default Settings:

AutofillEnabled => 0
PreferredBookmarkFolderId => 2
NotificationsEnabled => 0
ContentBlockerLastUpdated => 2022-08-12 00:00:00 +0000
ShowBackgroundImageOnStartPage => 0
isBackgroundImageDarkOnStartPage => 1
overflowMenuItems => (
)
WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled => 1
WebContinuousSpellCheckingEnabled => 1
WebAutomaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled => 0
WebAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled => 0
ShouldShowWelcomeAnimation => 0
DownloadLocation => /Users/spencer/Downloads
FirstLaunch => 0
FirstTimeWebExtensionNotice => 1
FocusMode => 0
HyperlinkAuditingEnabled => 0
LastUsedBuildVersion => 119
PreCompiledContentRuleListVersion => 119
LastCrashCheckDate => 2022-08-30 03:57:00 +0000
NetworkPredictionEnabled => 0
NextDownloadID => 184
OpenNewTabsInForeground => 0
SavedWindowSize => 1512.0,944.0
SavedWindowPosition => -0.0,-0.0
SendAdditionalDebugInformationWithCrashReports => 0
BookmarksBarVisible => 0
BookmarksSidebarVisible => 0
BookmarksSidebarWidth => 215.5
QuitWithConfirmation => 0
CurrentToolbarSize => small
ActiveLibraryTab => extensions
ActivePreferenceTab => websites
UndoTabClose => 0
BookmarksLastSynced => 1661831820734.804
ReadingListLastSynced => 1661831820735.415

Vlad

Cannabat Thanks that is fantastic input, we will see what we can do

Vinay

Facing the same issue today that closed tabs not getting flushed out.

Orion version: up-to-date
Mac OS: 12.5
No extensions installed (just a Plain vanilla Orion with default settings)
Tabs opened: Youtube, Reddit, LinkedIn

I tried to overload the memory by Opening bunch of productivity apps and Parallels VM and the memory pressure peaked to the high but the Orion Web Content (prewarmed) was not garbage-collected whereas Safari flushed them out.

I would be happy to provide if further information required to debug.

Vlad

Vinay Please provide exact steps to reproduce and observed states in both browsers.

Vinay

I have recorded a short video showing the closed browser tabs are held in memory after browser closed.

Dev12

Vinay @Vlad I faced the same issue as yours.

I normally use these sites in my M1 mini.

Youtube.com
Gmail.com (work and personal)
ESPN.com
facebook.com
google searches (work related windows)

I closed all the 5 tabs (did not quit the Orion and still running in background) but RAM is still holding up with the closed tabs.

OS: MacOS Monterey 12.5
PC: Macbook M1 Air 8gb | 256gb
Orion: 0.99.119-beta (WebKit 615.1.1)

I tested it with Safari as well. I believe that Safari usually don't clear the unused memory until the RAM gets overloaded.

I love the Adblocking capabilities of Orion and thinking to shift my entire workflow to Orion from Safari.

and I wonder if this is the default behaviour of Orion?